Competition for land and labour among individual farms and agricultural enterprises: Evidence from Kazakhstan's grain region

Der Wettbewerb zwischen Einzelbetrieben und Agrarunternehmen um Boden und Arbeit: Einsichten aus Kasachstans Getreideregion

Martin Petrick

No 141, IAMO Discussion Papers from Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO)

Abstract: This article evaluates the recent evolution of farm structure in Kazakhstan's grain region against the reform objectives of the 1990s and the family farm theory that underpinned the latter. In the study region, super-large agroholdings, large-scale enterprises and smaller individual farms emerged side-by-side and now compete for resources in a homogenous production environment. Drawing on two survey rounds of farm-level data, we find that the agroholdings display the highest factor productivity and are the most competitive on land and labour markets among all farms. However, we also find constant technical returns to scale across farm types and a layer of smaller family farms that is highly competitive on land markets. It is thus too early to conclude that large corporate farms are economically superior to individual (family) farms. But the present analysis clearly calls into question that family farms are a per-se desirable or even the only viable way of organising agricultural production. A revision of the received family farm theory may thus be due.

Keywords: family farms; agroholdings; land market; labour market; Kazakhstan; Familienbetriebe; Bodenmarkt; Arbeitsmarkt; Kasachstan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 P32 Q12 Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/83979/1/766259064.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Competition for land and labour among individual farms and agricultural enterprises: Evidence from Kazakhstan's grain region (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:iamodp:141

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAMO Discussion Papers from Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().